


Resuscitation

by misbegotten



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-31
Updated: 2010-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-06 21:46:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misbegotten/pseuds/misbegotten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto Jones died at Canary Wharf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Resuscitation

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: Cyberwoman, Army of Ghosts (DW), Doomsday (DW)
> 
> Thanks to seize for giving me courage. Flowers to bjewelled for the beta.

Ianto Jones died at Canary Wharf. There were brilliant scarlet flames to consume his remains and erase him.

Ianto Jones died in the Hub. There was a shallow pool to drown him, and a metal monster with his beloved's face to grind his bones.

Ianto Jones kept coming back from the dead. Somehow he didn't think he would have many more chances. More to the point, he no longer cared.

The darkness that enveloped Ianto now was a mercy, an unfeeling numbness weighting his limbs and suffocating his senses in cottony abandon. He wanted to stay buried deep in nothingness, but a sliver of pain trickled its way to his consciousness. Pain. That lightning flash of pain came back again, and again. With each breath, he realized miserably. It hurt to breathe.

Gleefully, as if waiting for him to give it the slightest opening into his cocoon of blank oblivion, pain edged through his defenses and began to devour him in careful pieces. His feet, where his shoes and socks had dried from his dip in the Hub pool, were now chafed and blistered. Knees, bruised from falling to the unforgiving concrete as he tried to piece together Lisa's torn body. Chest, his ribs fractured when Lisa threw him. Neck knotted and screaming, as if the muscles had unraveled and been looped back together into bundles tense as wire. Hands… Hands that held Lisa, had punched Jack, had beat on the impenetrable glass of the cell as he cursed the Cybermen and Torchwood.

With a muttered oath, Ianto opened his eyes. He pulled himself up from the cot that served as his makeshift bed in the cell and staggered over to the glass. His blood was smeared at eye level in a scrabbled series of punctuation marks. With deliberation he clenched his battered hand into a fist and struck. The blow jolted his arm, shooting pain up through his shoulder, and he grimaced. Striking again, he managed a smile as the throb of the blow echoed along his nerve endings. Stepping back a few paces, he twisted his shoulders into the best semblance of a tackle he could manage and launched himself forward. The crack of his body against the glass set off the Weevil at the end of the room, and he let the tempo of her cries drive his assault. Bang. Bang. Deep breath. Bang. Bang.

Feet clattered down the stairs and Owen appeared, scowling. "Shut the fuck up!" he bellowed, though whether it was to the Weevil or Ianto was unclear. Ianto gave him a grim smile and launched himself again as Owen scrambled to enter the keycode.

"I'm flattered that you want my company this badly," Owen drawled as Ianto staggered back from the glass. "But if you want to skip the foreplay we can get right to the part where I stitch your sorry arse back together."

Ianto quirked an eyebrow. "What's the point? Either you kill me or retcon me. No medical attention necessary." His eyes dropped to Owen's hand, where he held a syringe. "So unless that's a new form of Retcon, leave me the fuck alone."

Owen shrugged and started to turn away, but the tension in his shoulders betrayed him and Ianto was ready when he feinted. Grabbing Owen's arm, Ianto stopped the descent of the syringe and hissed in his ear, "Kill me. Or retcon me."

The stab of the needle in his leg jarred him, and he glared down where Owen had slipped another syringe from his pocket and injected him. "Sorry, mate," Owen said with a trace of pity. "Not my call."

Ianto tried to hang on to Owen, but the sedative was already taking effect and he staggered blindly. There was one good thing about Owen's drug, he thought grimly. It gave him what he wanted.

Oblivion.

*

Ianto had a lot of stuff. Most of it was packed in boxes, which made searching for potentially dangerous Cyberman technology a pain in the ass. Gwen's nervous commentary on everything she touched was also wearing on Jack's nerves. "Look at this studded belt!" she exclaimed. "I could never imagine Ianto wearing this."

"Gwen," Tosh said gently. "Why don't you start on the kitchen?"

As Gwen left the room Jack turned back to the box he'd been examining, finally tipping it to spill the contents out completely. It was a hodgepodge of items, thrown together in the box by somebody who apparently did not care whether a pair of dirty socks ended up next to a half-eaten sleeve of biscuits. Clearly, Ianto had not done the packing -- Jack had once found Ianto organizing the items on his desk in alphabetical order, the Slatarian egg paperweight nestled next to the stapler. Jack sighed as he shoveled the box's contents back into place. More likely, Ianto was simply too shattered after Canary Wharf to tend to the inconsequential with his usual care. Too busy tinkering with his Cybergirl.

Did that sound bitter? Yes, Jack decided, it was definitely bitter.

"Huh."

Tosh's grunt took Jack out of his thoughts and to her side. He put a hand on her shoulder and peered at the computer screen she was working from. "What have you got?"

"Well," she shook her head, as if she wasn't sure where to start. "Let's take the fact that this whole system is several thousand pounds worth of equipment." Tosh waved a hand at the computer set-up, which Jack had to admit was far more elaborate than your typical home hacker affair. She leaned forward and tapped the screen, drawing Jack's attention to the characters there. "Then there's the large sums of cash deposited in Ianto's accounts after Canary Wharf."

"Wait -- accounts, plural?"

Tosh nodded glumly. "He's clever, they're not in his name."

"London gave the survivors of Canary Wharf cash benefits," Jack pointed out. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "What's the significance of the money, Tosh?"

"Looking at his purchase history, cheque drafts and so on, I'd say he was using the money to pay for Lisa. The kind of equipment that he must have needed to keep her alive couldn't have been cheap."

Jack ran a hand through his hair. "Okay, so he blew a lot of cash on this project. Why don't you start looking--"

Tosh interrupted him with one of those looks that made him feel as if he were a very dull student and she was his tutor. "It's not the money that's significant, Jack. It's where it came from." She tapped the monitor again for emphasis. "London may have given him some hush money, but it was definitely Torchwood One that paid for Lisa's upkeep."

He peered at the computer screen, trying to see what she did. "The first transfer came from... what is that account?"

"That," Tosh said with some measure of satisfaction, "is Yvonne Hartman's discretionary fund."

He couldn't help it -- he laughed. He laughed so hard that Tosh started to giggle with him.

"What's so funny?" Gwen asked hesitantly from the doorway. Tosh sobered immediately, but Jack had to take a moment and wipe his eyes.

"It's not important," he finally managed. Noticing the small silver square in her hand, he beckoned her closer. "What have you got there?"

Gwen handed it over with a shrug. "PDA of some sort?" she guessed. "It was hidden behind the tea tins in the cupboard, which was a bit odd."

Jack glanced at it and then handed it off to Tosh. "Is the kitchen clear?" At Gwen's answering nod, he surveyed the mess they had made during the search and sighed. "We'll need to take the computer with us back to the Hub, but I think--"

Tosh's sharp inhalation of breath stopped him. "What is it?"

Her fingers were dancing over the shimmering screen in her hand. "It is a PDA, but this unlike anything I've seen on the market. This is more like Mainframe than a standard operating system -- more intuitive and elegant."

Jack put his hand out with a "gimme" gesture.

Tosh seemed loath to release her new toy, however. "The thing is, there's lots of information on here about the Cybermen."

"That makes sense, doesn't it?" Gwen asked.

Tosh shook her head. "I don't mean just a record of the months Ianto spent hiding Lisa. Much, much more information." She looked up at Jack, her eyes clouded with confusion. "There's years of research here. That's not possible. Is it?"

*

The drugs left a sour taste in his mouth, like something bitter and ashen had crawled down his throat and taken up residence. Ianto tried swallowing it away, but it didn't help. He nearly groaned, but the rest of his senses had scrambled to join him now that he had regained consciousness and he felt the presence of another in the room.

Opening his eyes, he found that Jack had pulled a chair downstairs with him and had placed it, back towards Ianto, across from his cot. Jack was straddled across it, his arms folded across the back of the chair, his coat draped elegantly behind him. He didn't move as Ianto struggled to right himself, finally managing to bring his feet to the stony floor.

They faced each other. It was nearly civil, if one discounted the bruising on Jack's face and Ianto's split knuckles.

Ianto suspected that Jack could outlast him, waiting until the sun went cold, but there was also something in Jack that sought solutions. Jack was a problem solver, and Ianto was his current quandary. It didn't surprise him, then, that Jack was the first to speak. It only surprised him that Jack had not yet taken the quickest and easiest solution and killed him.

"Ianto Jones," Jack said. His fingers drummed lightly against the chair.

"Sir." It was so much easier now to be calm, determined. So much easier now that Lisa's blood was dry against his skin, flaking away like uneven paint.

"Ianto Jones," Jack said again, rolling the sound on his tongue as if tasting it.

Stiffly, because it hurt like a sonofabitch, Ianto raised his hands and steepled the fingers behind his head. "Would you prefer that I kneel, sir?" he asked, staring at a fixed point just beyond Jack's ear.

Jack snorted. "Ask me some other time."

With a great deal of effort, Ianto restrained himself from punching Jack again.

"Put down your hands," Jack said wearily. "I'm not going to kill you." When Ianto kept his arms raised, Jack added pointedly, "Yet."

Ianto lowered his hands, but kept his eyes away from Jack's face. "Retcon then? Shall I prepare the dose myself?"

"Not until we talk about this."

He'd missed Jack pulling the PDA from a pocket. He couldn't ignore the object itself when it was shoved under his nose. His heart sank. Of course they would have searched his flat. He had expected to be long gone or dead before it came to that.

"It's a nifty toy. Tosh can't wait to play with it."

Ianto felt a shudder run through him. "You can't," he said hoarsely. Unwillingly he met Jack's gaze. "The information on there -- you've got to destroy it." He didn't realize he'd reached out until Jack's hand gripped his wrist.

"I don't have to do anything," Jack snarled. "What you have to do is tell me why you have the portable encyclopedia of Cybermen on your personal digital organizer." He thrust Ianto's arm back, and the force sent Ianto painfully against the cell wall. "Is this your idea of light reading? Or were you planning on using it to build another little playmate if things didn't work out with your girlfriend?"

Jack's fury was hardly unexpected. Ianto's own surprised him. He didn't think he had anything left to give.

"She was my wife!" he roared. And punched Jack. Again.

*

Ianto had a hell of a right hook. Jack had expected Ianto to launch himself at him after decking him (_Again._ Damn, he was getting slow.), but instead he was huddled on the cot, rocking slightly.

Okay, plan to provoke Ianto into stunning revelations successful. But what the hell did it mean?

Pulling himself up in the chair, Jack loosened his painful grip on the PDA. "So she was your wife, not your girlfriend. I'm sorry for your--" He swallowed, realizing he was getting away from the point. "I'm sorry. But where did you get this stuff?" Waving the PDA was fairly useless, given that Ianto clearly wasn't seeing him, but he did it anyway. Emphatically.

"Three years." Ianto's voice was hollow, like someone had scooped him out and left an empty husk.

I helped do that, Jack thought. "Three years what?"

"My wife had been dead three years the day I saw her at Canary Wharf."

Jack wished Tosh were here, because he was feeling very thick. "Lisa was dead before Canary Wharf?"

Ianto was still somewhere else, somewhere not in this cell, not in this city. His tone was almost conversational now. "Mickey warned us. He told us that we might see doubles, see ourselves even. I knew it, but I never expected--" Ianto tilted his head, as if considering. "It was a miracle. Don't you see, the fact that she was there and I was there was a miracle."

Jack put a hand on Ianto's shoulder. "I don't understand. Make me understand."

"We came across the Void, chasing the Cybermen. We didn't know about the Daleks. Mickey came from this world -- he went through first and signaled us when the attack began. He swore the Doctor would show up for that kind of trouble, and we could get answers about why it was happening. About the temperature rising and the Void and the end of the world."

Jack's grip on Ianto had tightened at the mention of the Doctor, but Ianto didn't seem to notice. "The end of the world," he repeated. "Ianto, the end of _what_ world?"

"My world," Ianto answered simply. "A world parallel to this one. We fought the Cybermen on our world and she died the day they disappeared. One more day, and she would have been safe."

Jack had a thousand questions, but he was afraid of bringing Ianto out of his truth-telling trance. "Go on."

"I spent three years working for Torchwood -- our Torchwood -- researching and studying the Cybermen. We finally traced them to this dimension, to your 'ghost shifts', and travelled across the Void to Canary Wharf and she was there." Ianto stuttered, choking on the words. "She was in a conversion unit screaming for help, screaming for _me_. My Lisa. She recognized me, called my name."

Jack's hand was still on Ianto's shoulder, but now Ianto gripped his wrist so tightly Jack knew there would be bruises. "Do you know the odds?" he asked fiercely. "No one ever survived, not even a partial conversion. I spent three years studying them. Studying the bodies. No one ever survived, before Lisa." His eyes were fevered. "It was fate."

She didn't survive, Jack wanted to say. He wanted badly to say it, but even more he wanted to push aside the growing fear that Ianto was right. Did the body of research in his hand prove it?

It was easier for all of them if Lisa couldn't be saved.

Maybe Ianto saw something in his face. He released Jack's wrist and settled back against the wall. "Kill me or retcon me, sir."

Jack stood up, kicking aside the chair. He slipped the PDA in his pocket, and with his other hand drew out his pistol. Cocking the hammer, he pointed the muzzle at Ianto's forehead. "Any last requests?"

"Yes, actually."

Jack raised an eyebrow at Ianto's even tone, and waved the gun slightly as a suggestion to continue.

Ianto closed his eyes. "I know I have no right to ask you for anything. But please, destroy the information on the Cybermen. It can't fall into the wrong hands. That work can never be duplicated."

Jack's finger wavered on the trigger. He studied Ianto, sitting passively before him, and then pressed the gun against the taut skin of his forehead. He leaned forward.

"Bang," he said softly in Ianto's ear.

Ianto's eyes flew open as Jack stepped back and reholstered his gun.

"Maybe it _was_ fate," Jack suggested. "Maybe you were meant to stay in this universe and come to Torchwood Three. Maybe this is exactly where you're supposed to be." He stuck out a hand, offering to help Ianto up off the cot. "The question is, are you ready to find out?"

Ianto plucked nervously at the seams of his filthy trousers. "And you'd let me? Just like that?"

Jack shrugged. "I know what it's like to be stranded far from home. I sure as hell know what it's like to make bad choices. Sometimes all you need is for someone to give you a chance to make the right ones."

Jack was about to drop his hand when Ianto shakily raised his arm slipped his own hand into Jack's grasp. With a tug, Jack brought him to his feet. He gripped Ianto's hand tightly, not letting go. "So this is the way it's going to work. You're going to get cleaned up, because you stink. Then you're going to help us finish cleaning up the Hub. You'll help disassemble the conversion unit, and we're going to burn the damned thing. And your files. Then you'll be placed on suspension."

Ianto sagged slightly at that, but did not protest. Jack squeezed his hand, bringing him back to focus. "I know being suspended without pay won't be a hardship since you seem to have accumulated a sizeable nest egg. I hope you'll use your suspension time getting to know this universe a little better. And deciding what parts of Ianto Jones' life you intend to keep." He leered playfully. "I really hope that includes the suits."

Ianto smiled wanly.

Jack's eyes narrowed. "In the meantime, if I find that you've been hiding anymore surprises I won't hesitate to pull the trigger. Do we have a deal?"

At Ianto's answering nod, Jack turned his hold on Ianto into a handshake and then released him.

Jack opened the cell door and swept into the corridor, leaving a somewhat stunned Ianto standing dumbly in his prison. "Come on," Jack urged him. "We brought you a clean suit."

"Sir--" Ianto began, but seemed at a loss beyond that.

Jack turned back impatiently. At the look on Ianto's face -- astonishment, gratitude, fear -- his own expression softened. "So tell me Ianto, was there a Captain Jack Harkness in your universe?"

A ripple of emotion crossed Ianto's face, and he ducked his head slightly before stepping forward to follow Jack. "I don't think the multiverse could handle more than one of you, sir."


End file.
